Leanne Trappe
- Mar 7, 2022
- 2 min read

Happy International Women’s Day 2022

Updated: Mar 8, 2022

I was approached a few weeks back about International Women’s Day and I have been doodling numerous ideas for a blog post since. It unleashed some personal demons that I hadn’t realised I so much needed to address and express. It also took me to thinking about why and how I am where I am as a creator and as a woman, and furthermore who helped get me here.

My journey to this point starts with an intrinsic need to create that has been there as long as I can remember. This has been ignited time and again by many incredible women who not only inspired my creativity, and later my creative work, but also my desire to find a channel for my own expression.

For me, creativity has been a lifeline through periods of recovery in my life (not all unrelated to the experiences of being a woman) and that is by no exaggeration one of the reasons I am here and the reason I am where I am In life.

However, I am under no illusion that the support, access to creative education and expressive encouragement that I have been so fortunate to have -and the healing it has offered- is a given for all women. I also realise the battles that many of the women who have so inspired me have gone through to get their work seen, to be heard; to be allowed to inspire.

That is why, for me, days like today‘s celebration of women and their achievements is so important. Women across the world continue to suffer the blows of inequality and the image of women that this bias leaves ingrained in society.

Women stand up continually despite the vulnerability often placed upon them. That vulnerability does not come from them but the society around them. Vulnerability and strength are not mutually exclusive, we can be fragile for whatever reason and have enormous strength. That is what many of my inspirations have taught me. Seeing the bias and vulnerability people face as ‘their‘ weakness misses entirely the fact that it is enforced by circumstance and society and yet they are still there rising each day...it is their strength that can be seen not any weakness. I hope days like today will help to cement the image of women as inherently strong over any other image left by inequality, bias and misinterpretation. And that this shift will allow a more egalitarian society in every respect.

on that note I shall leave a few of my favourite images of, and by women….

Happy International Women’s Day!